Scrum Thoughts

05Aug

I’ve just spent the afternoon reading the updated Scrum Guide from Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland.

There are some great points in it – some of which I have recorded here because in my experiences working with the various agile teams that I have met over the years it is good to have a reference point for some of the key things that I have noticed not working correctly, but are being done in the name of Scrum.

“Scrum recognizes no titles for Development Team members other than Developer. Regardless of the work being performed by the person, there are no exceptions to this rule; “

I like this – it is not the “developer” definition in the sense of a developer being someone who writes code, but a developer is someone who contributes to the development of the product. This has been used and maybe even abused in the past where teams consist of only programmers, rather than a cross skilled group of “developers”. We need to think about the skills needed in the team and the proportion of those skills, and what work is required to be done to complete the task as opposed to the titles of the team members.

“each event in Scrum is an opportunity to inspect and adapt something. These events are specifically designed to enable critical transparency and inspection. Failure to include any of these events results in reduced transparency and is a lost opportunity to insect and adapt.”

This one is a good one too – how many times to team decide to not do something because they don’t see the value and then head off down the wrong path. I was recently speaking to a group who does not do Showcases at the end of an iteration – why not? The extended team did not want to attend….what a missed opportunity and a “failure” according to the Scrum guide.

“Each Sprint may be considered a project with no more than a one-month horizon. Like projects, Sprints are used to accomplish something. Each Sprint has a definition of what is to be built, a design and flexible plan that will guide building it, the work, and the resultant product.”

This will challenge a lot of people’s thinking, particularly those teams who are tending to do incremental delivery of a predefined product, not looking at each interation as a separate activity that needs to be planned and actioned appropriately. I said something similar to this in a training session lately and almost everyone in the class gasped….until I explained the concept, then they all said “yup – that makes sense” (phew!).

“The Daily Scrum meeting is a 15-minute time-boxed event for the Development Team to synchronize activities and create a plan for the next 24 hours.”

How often do we hear of Stand-Ups being extended for the longer period. Meeting still need to happen but the standup or Daily Scrum is so important for this synchronisation and planning actions – teams that are dysfunctional and don’t understand the need for the stand-up or do them poorly often don’t have this coordinated view of what needs to be done by the whole team!